"Blindness" is a stylish, nightmarish tale of civilization gone wild

"It feels like I'm swimming in milk," gasps a victim of the "white blindness" plague in BLINDNESS, a wrenching Apocalyptic chiller adapted from Jose Saramago's novel. Set in an unnamed metropolitan area (and, like the book, featuring a cast of characters who are never identified by name), director Fernando Meirelles' deeply disturbing film suggests that we are a society poised on the brink of self-destruction and that all it would take would be one unexpected crisis to cause the entire social fabric to unravel.

In BLINDNESS, that catastrophe is an epidemic of sudden sightlessness that slowly but steadily infects almost everyone, from a call girl (Alice Braga) to a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) to an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo). The only person who somehow retains her vision is the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore) and, when her husband is going to be carted off to a quarantine zone with the rest of the newly blind, she pretends she's also been afflicted so that she can stay with him.

The wards in which the diseased are corralled turn out to be little more than concentration camps, with no supervision and meager supplies. In almost no time at all, savagery sets in and the fight for food forces the doctor's wife and her fellow prisoners to take drastic, ghastly steps.

Almost relentlessly downbeat, BLINDNESS relies heavily on Meirelles' stylish scene-setting (which includes inventive use of double-exposures, blurred images and blasts of white light) and the intensity of the performances to hold on to the audience. Moore is magnetic as a woman who initially seems frivolous and mild-mannered but who finds unexpected strength and leadership skills when she's threatened. Ruffalo, Braga, Danny Glover (as a man who continues to wear an eye patch over one eye, even though he can no longer see) and Bernal, as the asylum's lustful, power-hungry self-appointed dictator, are all very good.

Even so, the movie is at times gruelingly grim, even for a story of this type. The situation that unfolds in the outside world, where ravenous dogs chew on corpses and starving people stagger around in search of anything they might be able to eat, is reminiscent of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The combination of terrifying sights and anonymous characters makes BLINDNESS seem like a long bad dream and, like a particularly vivid nightmare, Meirelles' film leaves you shuddering even after it's over.